Friday, January 5, 2018

I don't listen to many podcasts because many of them feel like the hosts are just talking to fill time. But the 10-Minute Teacher Podcast hosted by Vicki Davis is an exception to that pattern. Every episode is just ten minutes long and is packed with handy tips for teachers. Every episode features a different guest who passes along some knowledge to teachers.

I was fortunate enough to be a guest on one of Vicki's recent 10-Minute Teacher episodes. In the episode I shared five of my favorite ed tech tools for social studies classrooms. You can listen to it here. And you can find all of the episodes here.

Immersive Reader is a free tool available from Microsoft. As I wrote earlier this week, Immersive Reader will read aloud the articles that students have in their OneNote notebooks. Immersive Reader does more than just read articles aloud. It will identify to students the nouns, verbs, and adjectives within an article. Students can also choose to have every syllable of word identified for them.

In the video that is embedded below I demonstrate Microsoft's Immersive Reader in action.

In the first years of Chromebooks the options for making videos were rather limited. Today, while there still aren't as many options as there are for Mac and Windows users, there are many more options available. In the document that is embedded below I have featured eighteen good options for making screencasts, animated movies, stop-motion videos, and audio slideshows on a Chromebook.

Here in Maine it snowed all day yesterday. I like the snow. What I don't like is the bitter wind that follows the day after a snow storm. Today's daytime forecast for my area has a high temperature of 1F and the wind chill down to -31F. If you live in a cold climate, your students might wonder how the wind chill factor is calculated. The following video explains how wind chill is calculated. The video comes from Mind Your Decisions. Use the video with Vizia or EDpuzzle to create a flipped lesson about wind chill.

In case you're wondering, we still have school when it is this cold. It's only large amounts of snow that keep schools from opening.